The private sector added jobs in May almost everywhere in the United States. The public sector lost jobs, also almost everywhere. Those two trends seem likely to persist in the months to come, as states continue to allow more businesses to reopen – and as state and local governments see tax revenues remain at depressed […]
Author: Floyd Norris
Republican View of Economy: Getting Worse, But Still Better than Obama
Just how bad is the economic outlook? These days the answer seems to depend on the politics of the person being asked. The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index is released weekly, based on a poll that asks only three questions. Consumers are asked to rate the overall economy, the buying climate and their personal finances as […]
Votes, deaths and layoffs
There are 50 states, but only 13 where the 2016 presidential election was decided by a margin of less than eight percentage points. Six of them went for Hillary Clinton and seven for Donald Trump. It is likely that this year’s election will be largely decided in those states. So how are they faring in […]
Market Volatility
Get ready for another crazy month on Wall Street. Months like March tend to come in pairs, at least as far as volatility goes. Daily moves of 4% or more are usually rare for the S&P 500; there were only ten of them in the entire decade of 2010 through 2019. In March, there were […]
Oily Disaster
The United States has become the world’s largest oil producer. That honor is likely to vanish, and with it a lot of companies. If so – and it is almost certain to be so if the oil price war is not promptly ended – the question will be what impact that will have on the […]
Trump stocks
President Trump has frequently pointed to the performance of the stock market in praising his own performance, although not in the past week when markets worldwide came down with (fears of) the coronavirus. Even at the end of the market’s worst week since 2008, the S&P 500 has still risen at a compound rate of […]
Memo to the Fed: Remember 2008
One thing I learned during more than 40 years as a journalist is that the power to set the terms of the debate sometimes can be decisive in determining the outcome of the debate. That could be happening now with monetary policy. By loudly demanding that the Federal Reserve lower interest rates – and announcing […]
Homeownership
The housing crisis from a decade ago is fading from consciousness for many Americans. But the ill effects of it are still apparent, particularly for those who bought homes in the years from 2005 to 2007. They paid high prices, and many mortgages had ominous terms that made repayment highly unlikely. The problem is most […]
A Surprising – And Ominous? — Boom
There has been much talk about the death of bricks-and-mortar retail, which traditionally hires hundreds of thousands of temporary workers in November and December for the Christmas rush. With more and more business being conducted online, it stood to reason that general merchandise stores — the Macy’s and Targets of the world — would be […]
More jobs than people to fill them?
We may have reached a point where there are simply not enough people who want to work to fill all the available jobs in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that in March there were 6,550,000 unfilled jobs in the country, on a seasonally adjusted basis. It reported there were 6,585,000 […]
Good and bad news in the jobs report
Here’s the good news: The unemployment rate for young adult men is now lower than it was on the eve of the financial crisis a decade ago. Here’s the bad news: So is the employment rate. The explanation for those seemingly contradictory facts is that there has been a significant rise in the number of […]